In 2005, I was one of the race directors and course designers for the adventure racing national championships to be held in Tampa, Florida. We had chosen the more than 20,000-acre watershed of the Hillsborough River for the event–encompassing the Hillsborough River State Park, several Hillsborough County wilderness parks, and the Lower Hillsborough Wilderness Preserve.
I spent days exploring the river, the area’s trails, and the less-travelled woods and wetlands between those more familiar paths. One of the “parks” in which I spent a lot of time was the Oak Ridge Equestrian Area–a little-used parcel managed by the Soutwest Florida Water Management District. Oak Ridge was a favorite not only because it was little-used, but largely due to its diversity of habitats. It bordered the Hillsborough River and included pine flatwoods, palmetto prairies, oak hammocks (and some of the largest old oaks in the county), grassy wetlands, and seasonally wet cypress forests.
During one of my expeditions, I used a familiar large oak tree as a starting point to leave the trail and bushwhack along a certain compass bearing. After busting my way through the saw palmettos and other thick vegetation for a bit, I came upon a “clearing” and a slight depression in the landscape. It was circular and filled with cypress stumps that had obviously been cut in the not-recent past. As I moved into the clearing, I noted a number of rubber and plastic children’s toys placed on top of or at the base of the cypress stumps–old doll heads, a shark, octopus, and other sea creatures, a cheap dump truck. They were worn and dirty. It was obvious that they hadn’t been used in some time. I spent a minute pondering how these toys may have gotten to a spot far enough from the trail that 99.9% of those out hiking here would never make the effort to visit. It seemed so random. But was it? Had extreme floodwaters simply washed the toys into the middle of the woods from a backyard bordering the preserve? Had some children been out there playing? Or did something more nefarious happen in this old cypress stand?
I never came up with a satisfying answer–yet the memory stuck with me over the years. It was vivid and powerful enough to compel me to think on it more in 2023. And, while I still didn’t deduce a suitable answer to the riddle, I did brainstorm a few fictional ideas based loosely on that imagery. The final result was a dark, historical fiction short story set in the 1850s in those very woods near the Hillsborough River.
The short story is currently available for Amazon Kindle readers (or on other devices using the Kindle app).
If you’d like to explore the Oak Ridge Equestrian Area yourself (please be properly prepared for a remote hiking adventure), you can check it out at these links:
When I started writing 
higher profile within the plot. I was still interested in the military’s continuing use of dolphins, but also in more troubling issues like the dolphin-drive hunts in Taiji, Japan, and the Faroe Islands and the continued whaling of nations like Japan, Iceland and Norway. When the dolphins in the novel are finally able to communicate with humans, they not only object to this horrendous practices, but to the myriad of negative impacts that humanity has had on the oceans they call home (and that also support our species). How does this objection play out for the dolphins and the human scientists working with them? How does it play out for the world? Well, you’ll just have to read 
For some reason, one line of plot ideas had me thinking about the possibility (or impossibility) of transporting dolphins and whales into space. After doing a little research on the limited lifting capacity of rockets, the potential for moving large quantities of water and the impact of gravitational forces on dolphins (who essentially live in zero gravity) that storyline died–at least until I decided to take the idea much further into the realm of science fiction.
I was intrigued and excited by the idea and eight months after starting seriously attacking the project, book one–
Kip Koelsch Author 